Reunion

2016

After 35 years, they meet for drinks.

They find each other on Facebook, where she has established a profile to spy on her teenagers, never suspecting how many friends not seen in a lifetime would find her there. Connections through others’ “Friends” lists lead her to him.

He’s happy to hear from her, and they correspond for almost a year before meeting. He is still in New York, successful as few are in the literary world; she practices medicine in the flyover city where she has lived for years.

They met in the early Seventies at a poetry reading in Lower Manhattan, the lynchpin social event for most young writers in the city. They had mutual friends: a former professor, friends of friends of an ex. One of these, now forgotten, introduced them.

She’d heard his name before, and knew his father was well known in entertainment. She came by some cachet with her dad, a World War II era novelist of the hard-drinking, womanizing, Village café dwelling generation. This prompted curiosity from others, and she had plenty of stories to tell, though the ones she knew best were kept to herself.

Their first date was dinner, at an Indian place in the East Village near his apartment, an area not yet chic and still scary. She lived virtually alone, save for a nearly invisible roommate, in her family’s 7 room place on the Upper West Side, her parents having fled to Europe in a wildly ill-advised remarriage after a flesh-ripping divorce. They fell into a relationship easily, travelling between opposite ends of the city to spend nights with each other.

He was shy, sweet, almost diffident. Nearly every evening was spent with his tight group of friends, known since high school or college, who went everywhere together and accepted her instantly. She, too, had friends of some standing, a small, defensive band, suspicious of outsiders and often jealous of each other. There was none of that with him.

Both worked subsistence jobs during the day, and spent nights together, often reading, working on their own writing, never uncomfortable with silence. Both began to publish, he more than she, never producing any emotion except pride for the other.

His parents lived now in a converted Victorian in New Jersey, which she and he occasionally visited on weekends. They seemed happy, with no tension or undercurrents of rage. They all talked about books and current events, and they played her old jazz and blues she had never heard. She once said, lying on the grass at night and looking at the almost embarrassing excess of stars, I wish we could stay here forever. Maybe that would have saved them.

She looks through her photo albums now, to post on her profile, and finds a picture, taken by his photographer friend, of the two of them on a field, she seated, he with his head in her lap, eyes closed, a slight smile on his face. It’s a sweet photo, full of the peaceful innocence of youth.

She finds some snapshots, this time by her very amateur hand. In two, his almost feminine face, dark eyes, curved lips, a Botticelli, looks not at but through her; sad, almost grim. In the third, he is turning to smile at whatever she said to break through his melancholy, which is heavier and heavier around him. She can never get out what it is. He begins to drink more, which frightens her.

Her parents’ relationship was a tsunami, periods of terrifying chaos punctuated by sneaky, deceptive stability. She was the oldest, closest to her tormented, alcoholic dad. She was there to answer the pounding on the door at 5 AM, to sit with him as he became more morose as night fell, to clean up the blood from the dramatic wrist cuttings, never deep enough to be dangerous, but sufficient to terrify two children. Crisis was her forte, her planet.

But he was never like that. He was surrounded by a perfect porcelain sphere, with no crack or foothold. Everything was even, the same, no swings or arguments. She realizes now from her clinical perspective that he was in a major depression. At the time, all she knew was that he held her at arm’s length.

But things continue without change. There is rarely tension between them; even when he is most shut down, there is tenderness and affection. They are both adrift to some degree, crummy jobs, no definite plan, resigned to low rent apartments and few luxuries.

Then she begins to get sick.

It happens gradually, nothing dramatic. It’s strange for her: she’s young, has no health problems. She gets weaker and weaker, friends worry about her pallor. One day she passes out at work.

The overworked ER resident tells her she has gastroenteritis and sends her home. But it never goes away. She calls her gynecologist, who reassures her everything sounds fine without seeing her. Her appetite goes, she can’t get up without feeling woozy, wanting to vomit.

Finally, one midnight, she knows things are bad, if she doesn’t go to a hospital, she will not make it. She wakes him up, asks him to take her. Its late, he’s exhausted, he’s been through this now for weeks. He tells her to wait till morning. She calls 911.

In the hospital, the same resident who sent her home now tells her something terrifying. She does not have gastroenteritis. She is pregnant, but the embryo has escaped her womb and attached itself to an ovary, where it has erupted and is now causing her to hemorrhage profusely. A lot of women die of this, he tells her, because it’s often misdiagnosed, unaware of the irony.

The doctor wants him to come in now so he can explain what’s going on. He asks, Are you and your boyfriend very close? Of course, she answers, but then she realizes that no, they aren’t really; she has never breached the sphere. This unsettles her. It can’t be possible to love someone without being close to them. One of these can’t be true. This is the beginning of the end.

But she does love him: it’s impossible not to. His fear, his neediness, his attentive presence in the hospital, all attest to his love for her.

When she is released, her roommate is gone and her mother has come home, full of new rage and bitterness for the inevitable betrayal when her father met someone else soon after their arrival. A new divorce is beginning, one that will last several years and consume the last of her ability to cope with the malignancy of her parents’ marriage, the way it has poisoned the family’s soul.

Her mother has blamed all her problems on her husband, on men in general, never taking a bit of responsibility. Of course, she disapproves of him; this is the only reaction she can allow herself. She is shocked when she hears that he didn’t rush her to the hospital. This sentiment is echoed by her female friends, typical 1970’s fish-without-a-bicycle feminists—He almost let you die! This is the mantra leading the slow resentment that finishes them.

She doesn’t quite believe this, though. Hadn’t the doctors sent her home more than once? If they didn’t know, how could he, a kid of 23? She starts to push him away, keeping him at the distance he has always kept her.

And now, she has found her purpose. She will go back to college, go on to medical school, even if it means never writing again. She wants to divest herself of that world, anyway; full of angry, depressed drunks who write beautiful books but sacrifice their families, where doom is just one missed paycheck away. She will be stable, respectable, able to find a friend in the hospital no matter the hour. She will be employable for life.

She spends fewer nights with him, is cold rather than passionate. One night he expects her to stay, but she asks him to walk her to the subway instead. As she is about to descend the stairs, he puts his arms around her and starts to cry. She embraces him for a long time, and tells him she loves him, the first time either of them has said this out loud. But still she goes home.

She spends the summer watching the Watergate hearings, does volunteer work at St Luke’s Hospital. He goes on a backpacking trip to Europe. She tells him she will take him to the airport, but changes her mind. She is really angry now, and doesn’t know why.

When he returns, months later, he comes to her apartment. They talk, on opposite sofas, she still cold, he tentatively reaching out, perhaps with hope. She brings up his failure to take her to the hospital. He’s already agonized about this, feels terrible, but she doesn’t feel like forgiving him. ..You almost let me die. This phrase, with its attendant terror, emerges as a metaphor in the low points of her life, when she relives the helplessness of slowly bleeding to death. They part cordially, but it is over.

And then, it’s gone, the anger, the blame, it just dissipates and leaves her with relief and the determination to go on without looking back. She starts her premed courses, keeps writing. She spends most of her time in solitude, with her books.

A couple of years later, she is giving a reading, one of her first, at a prestigious venue. There he is, with the same friends, at a table in the back. She is amazed, she is so glad to see them, and they her. All of them look at her with excitement and admiration. She notes wryly that her ever-smaller circle has managed to be otherwise engaged.

But she doesn’t see this as a gift, an opportunity. What are you doing afterwards? Let’s go out! Can I call you? She reads, and when it is over, they are gone, a golden orb just touching her fingertips, then slipping away.

He starts a magazine. She sends him some of her poetry. He sends it back, but with a long, respectful letter, comparing her to writers she greatly admires and explaining that it is just not right for them. Even in rejection, he is kind. She jokes to a friend that had he accepted it, she would have been insulted, the letter was so flattering.

After that, he fades into memory. She sees his wedding announcement, and feels an unexpected sense of loss. She finishes school, goes on to training. Her love life is no longer calm and tender; there are relationships, marriages, divorces, children. She is overwhelmed with work and seldom writes. Her heart, her happiness, have become scorched earth.

His books appear, one after the other, in lightning succession. Prose, poetry, something synthesizing both. And these are amazing: they are galaxies, universes of beauty and complexity, words chasing and teasing each other, so teeming with imagery it is hard to read all at once. This is what gestated inside the sphere. This is the person she was never allowed to see. She understands now that she never really knew him. She feels proud of him, sad for herself.

Now they are meeting again, at a trendy bar in the East Village, where they had formerly dodged Rastafarian drug dealers to get to his apartment. They sit, order drinks and dinner. As they catch up, she becomes progressively more anxious, wanting his forgiveness, to proffer the apology she has owed him all these years. She, who does not drink, orders a mango martini. It’s sweet and she can’t taste the alcohol. She is so absorbed in her desire to atone that, every time the waiter asks if she wants another, it is easy to say yes.

He tells her that he had met her father at a party shortly before his death from an alcohol related cancer. Her dad had spoken of her with respect and admiration, he says. She is hungry for this; she needs approval even from the dead. He would have written her a letter, but didn’t have her address. She knows that, had she received one, she would have been prostrate with gratitude. So begins her descent into desperate regret.

Before she knows it, she is watching herself from some other world, horrified, as the intoxicated person she tries to strong-arm into lucidity sabotages her dignity and grace. It is as though she is sucked into a tunnel, careening through time, seeing her former self with humiliating clarity. She has an epiphany as harsh as an interrogation lamp. He was the person she had been searching for, as she lurched from disaster to disaster, trying to wrest affection from men like her father, cold and disapproving, or too meek to defend themselves from her senseless rage. He might have been her chance for stability, to surrender herself and fall without fear into another life. Grief overwhelms her.

She doesn’t remember much later, except her drunken proclamations of love and pleas for his forgiveness. She doesn’t know how many were watching her debacle, her only consolation that it is New York and nobody cares. They finally leave and he helps her into a cab.

Two days later, when the contemptuous sneer of alcohol leaves her system, she writes to him and tries to salvage what there could be of their friendship. He replies with two sentences and says he was very glad to see her. Again, he is nothing but kind. She writes more letters of supplication; when he answers, which he seldom does, his letters are always brief and reassuring, with what she perceives as an undertone of relief for their estrangement.

She returns home. One day, as she organizes her study, she opens a box of old letters. There she finds a postcard he’d sent her from Europe, the summer she had emotionally severed him. He writes that he has been hitchhiking, making pilgrimages to literary landmarks, but that he wishes he had someone to talk to. He ends with, “I miss you, Love…”

And then she is sobbing, holding the card away so her tears don’t dissolve the last remnant of his love. She wants to hold that boy in her arms, and say, over and over, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I love you. I’ll make it up to you. I swear I’ll make it up to you.”